You Know You’ve Got A Newborn When..

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So you’ve became a mother. Congratulations. Welcome to the least exclusive club in the world.

YOU KNOW YOU’VE GOT A NEWBORN WHEN…

  1. You both leave the hospital in nappies.
  2. Your stomach resembles a scrotum.
  3. Getting dressed before noon is a dignity reserved for everyone else.
  4. Life has become a noxious mix of the incredibly mundane and the incredibly stressful.
  5. You are unable to leave the house for fear of: a) baby crying in public place, b) baby pooing in public place, c) baby needing feeding in public place. d) baby falling asleep outside nap time, e) baby waking up insidenaptime, f) self crying in public place.
  6. Your baby looks nothing like the cherubs on the Pampers commercials.
  7. Your baby looks Chinese.
  8. Your baby looks like it just did ten rounds with Mike Tison.
  9. Your baby looks like Sir Winston Churchill in his later, dribblier years.
  10. The bags under your eyes have bags.
  11. Your arse has bags.
  12. You wake up every morning drenched in sweat.
  13. Your vagina has morphed into something else entirely.
  14. Your thighs are still so big, that when you walk down the street wearing cords, it sounds like you’re having a swordfight.
  15. Your maternity jeans won’t stay up and your old jeans won’t go on.
  16. You still look 6 months pregnant.
  17. Your baby’s genitals are vast and a bit purple; before they revert to normal size, you take a few photos to impress gullible non-parents.
  18. You spend most of your day sat on the sofa flashing at visitors.
  19. Your baby is passed around visitors like a spliff.
  20. You resent your husband for not helping enough with the babycare (“Does he think I’m a skivvy?!”)
  21. You resent your husband for helping too much with the babycare (“Does he think I’m incompetent?!”)
  22. Your baby’s original hair falls out and grows back in a different colour. Not unlike Sir Elton John’s.
  23. You walk around the house with a muslin cloth constantly draped over your shoulder, just in case.
  24. You have carpal tunnel syndrome due to hours spent dangling your arm into the moses basket.
  25. You discover a sudden ability to do EVERYTHING one-handed.  Seriously… who needs left hands??
  26. You’re forever sending your husband to the chemist to purchase another pack of industrial-sized maternity pads, the kind that make you look two inches taller when sitting down.
  27. At least once a week you press a jam jar to your baby’s heat rash and spend the first three months of your baby’s life hanging on the phone to NHS direct.
  28. Your livingroom resembles a Freshers party – a lot of noise, random items of clothing strewn over the floor, half-eaten scraps of food down the sofa, vomit on the carpet, stench of urine, a fight.
  29. With so much urine soaked into the carpet you begin to convince yourself that it strengthens the carpet weave.
  30. Your sofa functions as a full-blown dairy.
  31. Underwired bras are distant relics.
  32. You discover how awkward buggies are; they make you feel as though you are wrestling a wayward office chair down the high street.
  33. An umbrella is about as useful to you as a pair of crotchless panties.
  34. You haven’t slept more than two hours for almost ten days.
  35. Cabbages are the new lingerie.
  36. Your irrational fear of earplugs has miraculously turned into a love of them.
  37. You look like you’re about to win a wet t-shirt competition.
  38. You experience what appears to be the worst visit you’ve ever had from Aunt Flow. It makes you begin to wonder, is it OK to be losing so much blood? When does lochia stop being lochia and start being a hemmorrhage?
  39. You shed more hair than the cat.
  40. Your legs could be used as a road map.
  41. Projectile wee and poo are a normal part of your daily routine.
  42. You discover that the shower doubles as an effective bidet.
  43. You proudly display the baby’s shrivelled cord stump on the mantlepiece and then can’t understand why people don’t appreciate it.
  44. You start to wonder, was gender equality just a bit of fun to occupy your twenties, like university? Was it all a sick joke?
  45. You can’t remember your pin number even though it’s been the same since you were 15.
  46. It takes three hours just to leave the house.
  47. Counting your baby’s bowel movements brings you great satisfaction.
  48. A trip around the supermarket without the baby feels like a spa vacation.
  49. Whilst on said trip you find yourself rocking the trolley back and forth in a soothing manner.
  50. You can’t remember the last time you consumed hot food.
  51. You regularly eat breakfast at 2pm.
  52. You often don’t have any hands free so you store objects in your cleavage, and then forget all about them.
  53. Being a hermit is your new occupation.
  54. If you threw out every item of your clothing that had been peed, shat or puked on you would be stark naked within two months.
  55. You look older than your late grandmother.
  56. You look down at your arm a week after leaving the hospital and realize you still have adhesive from the tape that held the IV to your wrist.
  57. You stagger like a zombie through the park, surrounded by other staggering zombies pushing prams.
  58. Tiny socks that keep getting separated from each other are scattered about your house like confetti.
  59. You start drinking iced tea because it tastes better than cold normal tea.
  60. Is that someone squeezing a ketchup bottle? No it’s your baby taking a dump… just after you’ve changed them.
  61. You get excited the first time you go #2 and it doesn’t feel like you’re having a second baby.
  62. You sleep in spit up because it’s not worth changing the sheets at 3am.
  63. You want to knock out the postman for ringing the doorbell 4 times in 30 seconds.
  64. Once baby is asleep you find you are capable of moving with stealth that a ninja would be proud of.
  65. Your husband arrives home from work and you want to throttle him …just because.
  66. You get around to writing the birth announcements when your baby is three months old.
  67. You put the baby in the swing in the bathroom so you can take a quick shower with the curtain half open.
  68. You smell like a truck driver and don’t care.
  69. You hope that another coat of deodorant will mask your putrid smell so that you can go without a shower for ANOTHER day.
  70. ‘Me time’ takes a nose dive.
  71. You wait at pedestrian crossings until the green man shows instead of nipping across when there’s a break in the traffic.
  72. Your once perfectly reliable washing machine packs up almost immediately.
  73. You go to bed at every opportunity, and usually only to sleep.
  74. Your husband asks you to clarify something you just said and you have no clue what he is talking about.
  75. It feels like a luxury to pee without the sound of screaming or having to push the urine out any quicker than it wants to come out.
  76. There’s so much extra skin on your belly that when you bend over, you look like an accordion.
  77. Everyone and everything pisses you off.
  78. You know the exact location and diameter of every squeaky board in your house.
  79. You wake up to a fart and smile.
  80. You expected to add nappy, dummy, buggy to your new motherhood vocabulary – you didn’t think f*!k and s#*t would feature so prominently.
  81. There are major supply and demand issues in the bedroom.
  82. It’s only once you face that first day alone in the house with the twin horrors of a new baby and Jeremy Kyle for company that you wish your mum and dad lived next door.
  83. You now know what they meant with the whole for better or for worse business at your wedding. Often things get nasty. Doors are slammed and sofas are slept on.
  84. You are starting to fear that your body will never be the same again.
  85. You don’t touch a pan handle or a broom handle for over a month.
  86. The internet keeps you sane when it would otherwise be easy to assume the world has forgotten about you.
  87. You cannot take in one more piece of information without having to lose one that was already in your head.
  88. You pee when you laugh.
  89. Dinner consists of things that are not too messy if dropped on a baby’s head.
  90. You spend 99% of the time either moaning, crying or fantasising about your baby going to sleep.
  91. You make up words to the songs played by the baby’s swimg/bouncy chair.
  92. You feel a sense of accomplishment after showering.
  93. Even people who have children walk into your house these days and do a double take.
  94. You find your hairbrush beginning to look like a puppy.
  95. You think that childbirth and child development are the most compelling topics imaginable.
  96. When shopping you are now banished from the convenient escalators near the middle of the store and relegated to the dark hidden corners near the freight dock where the lifts are kept.
  97. Suddenly everyone seems to care where you are planning to have Christmas dinner or which grandmother you plan to honour with your presence on Mother’s Day.
  98. You are so fatigued that you look longingly at hospitals.
  99. You have to use Kleenex for toilet paper because you haven’t been shopping for a while
  100.   You guard your baby’s dummy or comfort blanket with the same attention afforded to the Hope Diamond.
  101.   Your upper arms are bigger than your thighs used to be, and your thighs are bigger than, well, let’s just not go there.
  102.   You don’t want to see anything come near your lady-parts for several weeks if it isn’t filled with crushed ice or local anaesthetic.
  103.   You become as astute as a tea leaf reader at interpreting the contents of your baby’s nappy.
  104.   The pile of washing your baby creates each day weighs more than they do.
  105.   Babycare books seem to describe an alternative universe to the one you are inhabiting.
  106.   7am used to be considered early. Wow! 7am! That’s practically a lie-in now.
  107.   Your husband becoming ill is just a big fat inconvenience. You’re a man down. It’s like he has become ill just to spite you.
  108.   Your mail is piling up like snowdrifts on the hall table.
  109.   Yesterday’s top is still out so you pop it on then realise once you’re out of the house that it has a trail of puke across its shoulder.
  110.   You find yourself entwined in a nightly vigil of hovering, on tiptoe in the doorway of your baby’s nursery like a strange, eavesdropping, pyjama-clad FBI agent.
  111.  You cry about everything, from Sudanese famine to running out of jam.
  112.  You explain yourself to stick-thin sales assistants: “I’ve just had a baby” you tell them apologetically.
  113.  You catch your mother in law using a breastpad as a drinks coaster.